How a Nexus of Communities Mediates a Novice Writing Teacher: A Case of the Dialogically-Interpreted Narrative from the Sociocultural Perspective

Abstract

In this self-reflective narrative inquiry based on teaching journal entries and interpretive dialogues, I trace how a nexus of communities mediated my own development as a novice writing teacher when I first began teaching in another languaculture. Combining activity systems analysis and autoethnographic narrative analysis allowed me to better understand the roles and influences of the community in gradually transforming me from a deficient nonnative teacher to a crosscultural meaning-maker with multimodal affordances. Specifically, three types of interrelated communities were mediating my development, namely the co-working, the co-walking, and the co-orienting community. This inquiry revealed two significant lessons. First, my development as a multilingual writing teacher was a process of reconceptualizing the scope of communities that mediate me. Second, the support of these communities materialized when it met my multimodal, multilingual, and conceptual repertoire. (Seoul National University)